Four by Four #40

Writing News

T’shuvah was listed in CLMP’s Reading List for Jewish American Heritage Month 2025.

Four Things To Read

Remembering The Alchemists & Other Essays, by Richard Hoffman:

A self must learn. The body is. The body knows. A self learned to act as if it is real, and learned to ignore what the body knows. The body transcends the self and not, as religions have it, the other way around; even when they posit a stand-in for the self called the soul, the idea is that a personal transcendence is possible and ought to be sought after. Begin with that orientation to the divine, and one can talk all one wants about charity, generosity, brotherhood—it’s every man for himself. Even before there were religions there was religious war.

—from “Like Never Before”

At the center of this book of essays is a moral clarity rooted in an uncompromising commitment to the integrity of the body, and particularly to the bodies of children, as the foundation of a truly just society, which makes sense given that Hoffman was raped as a boy by a man he trusted. The book, however, is not a survivor’s memoir. Rather, the essays explore what it means to take that stand and apply it to the environment, to art, to love, to the question of whether there are lines we should not cross in trying to humanize those who declare themselves our enemies, and more. The voice through which Hoffman speaks in these pieces is approachable, patient, curious; he does not hide the moments of his own uncertainty or smooth the rough edges of his trying to figure things out; and that kind of honesty—not just in what he says, but in how he says it—is what made this book so moving for me.

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The Law Cannot Let Itself See The Nakba, by Joshua Abramson Cohen:

You don’t get to identify as a Zionist in a vacuum.

This interview with Rabea Eghbariah centers around an article Eghbariah published in the Columbia Law Review called “Toward Nakba As A Legal Concept,” which is a closely argued, thoroughly researched and heavily footnoted piece that I am about halfway through. Boiled down to its essence, Eghbariah’s argument is that international law should adopt Nakba as the term to describe the “project of erasure” of the Palestinians that Zionism has been engaged in for the past 100 years. There are, of course, a whole lot of assumptions baked into that sentence, among them the question of whether or not erasing the Palestinians has, in fact, been a central component of the Zionist project. (And I understand Zionism here to be not the Jewish emotional connection to the land of Israel, but rather the concrete, specific, and material actions taken in relation to the Palestinians by the Jews who settled the land and by every Israeli government that has been in power since the state was founded.) I know there are people reading this who will have difficulty with the fact that I have given any credence at all to Eghbariah’s argument, but I urge you to read the interview and Eghbariah’s law review article nonetheless. Here is what he says before the line that I have quoted above:

Just as Nazi ideology produced the Holocaust and Afrikaner nationalism generated apartheid, so, too, did Zionism birth the Nakba. From there, Zionism and the Nakba have come into existence hand in hand, with the destruction of Palestinian life making the Jewish state a reality.

To call yourself a Zionist and deny this fact—that the Palestinians would not have experienced the Nakba if Zionism had never existed; that Israel would right now not, for example, be forcing the Palestinians in Gaza into starvation, if Zionism had never existed—is to erase Palestinian existence and experience in precisely the way Eghbariah argues it has been the Zionist project to do. I have not called myself a Zionist for some time now in large measure because I agree that, whatever else might be true about the inescapable role that the Land of Israel—not the State, but the land—plays in Jewish religious and cultural identity, it is impossible to separate Zionism as a political project from the oppression, and now genocidal warfare, Israel has visited up on the Palestinians. You may disagree with me on that, but if that disagreement is not informed by an honest, good faith confrontation with analyses like Eghbariah’s, then you are indeed identifying as a Zionist in a vacuum.

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Where’s the outrage over ‘systematic’ sexual violence against Palestinians?, by Samah Salaime:

As it turns out, even a dramatic escalation in gender-based crimes against women and girls during the war, and the unequivocal determination that Israel’s use of these methods was systematic, rather than merely isolated acts by individual soldiers, wasn’t enough to drive Israeli or international women’s organizations to oppose, condemn, or even call for an urgent examination of the issue. Even the fact that the report was released just days before International Women’s Day didn’t suffice to spark webinars, symposiums, or conferences at universities around the world, nor emergency discussions in parliamentary committees for the advancement of women’s rights.

Salaime wrote an article I linked to in Four by Four #17 called “Women’s liberation mustn’t stop at either side of the Gaza fence,” in which she argued that “feminist principles compel us to stand with both the Palestinian women being slaughtered in Gaza and the Israeli women testifying about sexual violence.” In the article I’ve linked to here she talks about having “lost [both] Palestinian comrades” over her “condemnation of Hamas’ violence against Israeli women” and “Jewish friends who regarded women in Gaza as legitimate targets.” If that last quote brought you up short, consider the quote Salaime brings from the UN report of comments made by Eliyahu Yosian from the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, “The woman is an enemy, the baby is an enemy, and the pregnant woman is an enemy.” Granted, he made those comments on the far-right Channel 14, but, as we have seen here in the States, once a government and/or the media leave an opening for extremist ideas to become part of the national conversation, it’s not hard for the people who hold such views to normalize them. Most disheartening is the reactions Salaime quotes from some very high profile women and women’s organizations in Israel, all of whom insist that the UN report is just one more “step in the campaign to delegitimize Israel.”

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How the Sausage Gets Made: Inside Hollywood’s Prosthetic Penis Craze, by Emma Fraser:

When a Euphoria scene calls for a prosthetic, Collins talks through the technical aspect with makeup-department head Doniella Davy. Is the penis erect…or flaccid? Will it require liquid? If so, “It’s a tube running through the [prosthetic] penis itself, and it’s being pumped out," Davy says. “If a person just needs to stand naked in a room, or walk naked through a room, his real penis will be filmed as long as the actor is comfortable with it. We only use penis prosthetics when penises need to do specific things other than just make an appearance.”

Part of me wants to let the title of this article and the above quote speak for themselves, but that last sentence—“We only use penis prosthetics when penises need to do specific things other than just make an appearance”—makes me want to point out that there is in the article an understated, but I think significant, acknowledgment of the emotional and psychological vulnerabilities that come with living in a male body that are too often minimized, trivialized, or entirely elided by cultural expectations surrounding manhood and masculinity.

Four Things To See

All images are from The Cleveland Museum of Art and are in the public domain. All text is quoted from Wikipedia.

The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), by Albert Pinkham Ryder

Albert Pinkham Ryder (March 19, 1847 – March 28, 1917) was an American painter best known for his poetic and moody allegorical works and seascapes, as well as his eccentric personality. While his art shared an emphasis on subtle variations of color with tonalist works of the time, it was unique for accentuating form in a way that some art historians regard as a precursor to modernism.

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Morning Glory with Black, by Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "Mother of American modernism", O'Keeffe gained international recognition for her paintings of natural forms, particularly flowers and desert-inspired landscapes, which were often drawn from and related to places and environments in which she lived.

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Orpheus, by Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon (April 20, 1840 – 6 July 1916) was a French Symbolist draftsman, printmaker, and painter. Redon is perhaps best known today for the dreamlike paintings created in the first decade of the 20th century, which were inspired by Japanese art and leaned toward abstraction. His work is considered a precursor to Surrealism.

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The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy), by Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh (March 30, 1853 – July 29, 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created approximately 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. His oeuvre includes landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, most of which are characterized by bold colors and dramatic brushwork that contributed to the rise of expressionism in modern art.

Four Things To Listen To

All text is quoted from Wikipedia.

3MA · Rajery · Ballaké Sissoko · Driss El Maloumi

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Florence Price Violin Concerto No. 2

Kelly Hall-Tompkins, violin

Florence Beatrice Price (née Smith; April 9, 1887 – June 3, 1953) was an American classical composer, pianist, organist and music teacher. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was active in Chicago from 1927 until her death in 1953. Price is noted as the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra.

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Esperanza Spalding - I Know You

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The Man I Love (George & Ira Gershwin) - Mary Lou Williams

Four Things About Me

A few years before it was published in 2006, The Silence of Men was a semifinalist for what was then called the Walt Whitman Award, the Academy of American Poets’ prestigious first book prize. (It’s now called the Academy of American Poets First Book Award.) Sherod Santos was the judge. I was very uninformed back then about how contests worked, so I assumed that he, not the group of gate-keeping readers the Academy almost certainly employed to weed out everything but the finalists—had read my manuscript and placed it in the semifinalists pile. I knew nothing about him other than his name, so I bought one of his books. I don’t remember which one it was, but I do remember not thinking very highly of it. I didn’t win, but I’d been submitting the manuscript to first book contests for some time, at a not inconsequential cost, so knowing that this time my manuscript had made it as far as it did was tremendously affirming. I played the contest game for a couple of years after that, but I never again received a letter telling me my manuscript was, as they say, “a contender.” I finally decided contests weren’t worth the money and started looking consciously for presses that would publish a first book without a contest. That’s how I found CavanKerry Press, my first publisher, and with one exception—the National Poetry Series, a $10,000 prize is nothing to sneeze at—I have not submitted to a book contest since.

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The contest model has always irked me in general, not least because of a built in bias I started sensing some time ago that was documented by Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young, and Claire Grossman in their article “Literature’s Vexed Democratization,” that awards an overwhelming number of career-making literary prizes to MFA-holders, with fully half of those winners having graduated from one of four schools: Columbia University, New York University, University of California in Irvine, and the University of Iowa. First-book poetry prizes, though, bother me for a different reason as well: the way they fetishize the first book. I read an essay a long time ago in which the writer, I think it was Eavan Boland, talked about what is lost when first books are expected to be perfect enough, whatever that might mean, to win contests or pass muster as MFA theses. She missed, she said, how uneven first books used to be (in whatever time frame she was referencing), the pleasure of watching from poem to poem as the poet tried different things, some of which would pan out and some of which would not. I don’t know if this is what I remember from the essay or if this is my own framing, but it seemed to me that Boland was talking about a level of vulnerable authenticity, or maybe authentic vulnerability, that the polish required to win a contest or pass muster as a thesis tends to smooth over. It’s an interesting point, but I wish I had the essay so I could say more about it. (If anyone reading this knows the essay I’m talking about, please let me know.)

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I’ve never read Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, but, back when I was first learning how to be a poet, it was not uncommon to hear poets talk about poetry as being part of “the gift economy.” A poem, this way of thinking went—if I remember correctly—should be thought of not as a commodity, but as a gift given, freely given, with no strings attached, by the poet to the community. I really liked that way of thinking about the poems I was making, though I also remember wondering how that framework made room for the fact that a book of poetry was a commodity by definition. When I think now about this way of seeing poetry and what it means to be a poet, though, what strikes me is how at odds it is with the professionalization of creative writing that the proliferation of MFA programs has brought about. While I have my own opinion about that, I mean it here as a description, not a criticism. In an interview that I cannot find, Patricia Spears Jones talked about how relatively new it is to hear poets talk about and work at “having a career” as a poet and mean something that is different only in degree, not kind, from what it means, for example, to have a career as a teacher or a lawyer. I wish I could remember exactly what Jones said, because it was far more eloquent than how I am going to paraphrase her here: that she never thought of herself as having a career as a poet, she just made poems. I often wonder—and this has nothing to do with the quality of the poems that get written—what we have lost with the waning of that perspective.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my early influences, in part because I am in the process of being email-interviewed by a poet from Iran who asks questions that, even when they are not about influences, compel me to reflect on why I think about things the way I do, and that reflection inevitably involves thinking about the poets and writers whose work first shaped me. I’ve also been thinking about early influences, though, because I’ve been noticing lately how generally uninterested I am in trying to keep up with what is current in the poetry world. I don’t mean that there aren’t poets whose work I like and respect, or that there aren’t conversations that I think are important enough to pay attention to and that I sometimes learn from, but so much of what is hyped as new and exciting—and I will admit up front that this is an unfair and inaccurate generalization, that what I am putting down here is my unexamined emotional response—ends up feeling more like what I will call an intellectualization of the impulse to poetry than an engagement with the art itself that it makes me want to reconnect with the poets and writers that fed my initial impulse. Here are a few:

• Poetry: John Donne, e. e. cummings, June Jordan, Ai, Albert Goldbarth, Robert Creeley
• Prose: June Jordan, James Baldwin, Hayden Carruth, Sallie Tisdale